Yesterday I was working with my team mates and their came a requirement to create a site collection but with consideration of future also. Things need to be fulfilled with help of Managed path. So , I thought to share the concept of managed path, wildcard inclusion and explicit inclusion with you all.

Let’s work with an example. Suppose I have a SharePoint site http://abc.com or any for abc company and today I got a requirement to create 3 site collection 1 for HR , Finance and Learning and the first 2 (HR and Finance will contain no of sites & site collection in it) and constraint for the 3 Learning, is that it should be directly under the root site abc.com .

How the things will be configured and work? We have to work with Managed path.
Managed path is a concept given by Microsoft to create different site collection according to different requirement. It is a path managed by SharePoint which will specify how many site collection can reside in a particular url. SharePoint has two type of managed paths:

1) Explicit Inclusion: it is a managed path under which no further site collection can be created. By default MOSS has a root as an explicit inclusion. N no of inclusion can be created manually. So as per my requirement I have to create site collection directly under abc.com. so first I will use root explicit inclusion to create my first ever site collection http://abc.com/ . and then I will create an another explicit inclusion “/Learning” and then I have a site collection with url as http://abc.com/learning .

Constraint: in Future I will never be able to create any site collection under learning.

2) Wildcard Inclusion: It is managed path under which n number of site collection can be created. By default MOSS has sites as only wildcard inclusion. N no of inclusion can be created manually
So as per my requirement I have to create 2 site collection under which number of site and site collection can reside .So with this requirement I will create an wildcard inclusion with name /HR and /Finance and the url for that will be http://abc.com/HR and http://abc.com/finance and now I have n no of site collection under /finance and /HR . ex. /HR/dep1 & /HR/dep2

So, on working with concept of wildcard and explicit requirement should be crystal clear . so that the things can be created to suit specific purpose.

Hope I was able to describe the content correctly based on my knowledge and learning.